This Old House: The Dorchester House
The Dorchester House is the first arc of This Old House, taking up the entirety of the first season. The house being renovated is an 1860 Victorian house built in the Second Empire style, located on 6 Percival Street in the Meeting House Hill neighborhood in Dorchester, one of the oldest areas within Boston. The thirteen-episode arc was originally broadcast on Tuesdays at 8:30 PM, between February 20 and May 15, 1979. Episode 1 Original airdate: February 20, 1979 Bob Vila begins by introducing the series and the project. Professional real estate appraiser John Hewitt helps him examine the house and decide how to go about the renovation process, beginning with the outside moving in and upstairs. Between the examination of the upstairs areas and the examination of the cellar, Bob shows a taped interview with John Crosby, the real estate broker who sold the house to WGBH. At the end of the episode, Bob sums up Hewitt's grim appraisal of the house but remains optimistic that he and his team can fix it up, beginning with exterior renovation by the carpenters and interior demolition by Bob himself, and teases construction of the dream kitchen. Episode 2 Original airdate: February 27, 1979 Master carpenter Norm Abram makes his first appearance, working on the mansard roof as Bob introduces the program. Having diagnosed the main problem as rot, Norm has already stripped the gutter, which had been leaking water into the house from behind, and proposes placing a single board where the old gutter used to be, and placing the new gutter in front of that board in order to eliminate the interior leakage problem. The brackets had also taken some damage from the leakage, but as fully replacing them would be too expensive Bob instead suggests trimming and repairing them. Norm estimates that repairing the roof on one side would take 2-3 days. Associate producer Bonnie Shatsky Hammer discusses the history behind the house, revealing that the first owner of the house was part of an important family who had helped build Dorchester from the ground up, among other factoids about the house and the property it sits upon. Hammer also discusses the renovation history of the house. Bob reveals that the mud room has already been demolished and is awaiting disposal in the nearby dumpster, with plans to extend the deck right along where the mud room used to be and turn it into a terrace. Entering the kitchen, Bob talks about how empty it is now compared to last week, with much of the furnishings in the dumpster along with the mud room and explains how hard it is to remodel a kitchen compared to the rest of the house. He then suggests moving the door along the wall to replace one of the windows in the kitchen and connecting it to the dining room, among other fixes, looking at a map drawn of the house to verify those fixes and also think of other cool enhancements to make to the kitchen itself. Next, Bob discusses heating with energy auditor Ross Donald in the cellar, where it's revealed that the heating system is extremely inefficient, with a lack of insulation and an outdated heater. Ross recommends Bob see a heating engineer about a replacement for the heater. Bob closes the episode with a lesson on interior demolition and teases the renovation of the kitchen and bathrooms, and also the start of rough plumbing. Trivia * This is the only season to not be distributed by the Public Broadcasting Service. * According to Bonnie Hammer, it took 2-3 days to get an idea of the history of the house through deeds, street atlases, street directories, and wills. * The original owner of the land on which the house sits was a certain John Parks, who purchased the property in 1818, long before the house was built. The first owner of the house itself was writer Eliza Thayer Clapp, best known for writing Studies in Religion, who purchased the house in 1861 as the Civil War broke out. During the Great Depression, the house was repossessed by Home Savings Bank, which sat on it for five years before selling it to surgeon Arthur T. Ronan, who resided in the house for 29 years before selling it to John Crosby.